What Kind of Twitterer Are You?

According to a new study from Rutgers University, four out of five Twitter users are the latter, posting updates mainly about themselves. The remaining 20% are “informers,” tweeting information, such as links to news articles.

Communication professors Mor Namaan and Jeffrey Boase, and doctoral student Chih-Hui Lai, came up with the terms while studying what they call social-awareness streams.

The professors, who also teach a class on the design and use of social media, selected 350 random Twitter users that had at least 10 followers and had posted at least 10 messages. They chose 10 random tweets from each user and classified them into categories based on content, such as “information sharing,” “self-promotion” or “random thoughts.”

They coined the term “meformers” to describe users whose tweets could frequently be categorized as “me now” — what they were doing or how they were feeling. These updates do serve a purpose, they said. “Although the Meformers’ self focus might be characterized by some as self-indulgent, these messages may play an important role in helping users maintain relationships with strong and weak ties.”

Mr. Boase said the presence of the informers category caught him by surprise. “A general perception is that Twitter is all about, ‘I’m easting breakfast, I’m really tired, blah blah blah,’” he said. “There is this one really significant portion of users that are not just talking about themselves. Most of what they’re doing is giving information to other people.”

While the researchers haven’t yet looked into the psychology behind the different kinds of messages that Twitter users post, they did find that meformers and informers had a few key differences. Women post more “me now” tweets than men do (45% for women versus 37% for men). Informers generally have more friends in their social networks, with a median of 131 friends they follow and 112 followers, versus the meformers’ median of 61 friends and 42 followers.

Informers tend to mention other users more often in their tweets, at 54% of the time, versus meformers, who mention others 41% of the time. Informers also post more often and reply to other users more frequently, and though the authors haven’t yet looked in to why, they suspect that perhaps they are seen as more interesting and thus attract more followers. On the other hand, they may want to post more informative tweets because they have more followers.

Tweeting from a phone also appears to make a difference in tone: 51% of updates from cellphones were “me now,” versus 37% from non-mobile apps.

Mr. Boase said his group would next like to analyze tweets over a longer period of time and find out whether users are more likely to unfollow the “me now” updates of meformers, while they might continue to follow the information-based tweets of an informer.